8
CIRQUE
Jean Anderson
Roma: St. Louis, 1947
Three things. First, Roma. From the attic window, we stare down at their caravan like a picture from a storybook: a covered wagon magically dropped into the bare weedy lot behind my cousins’ three-story brick house. It’s almost dusk, and an old woman in a flowing and flowery long red skirt bends over a huge pot on the ground, stirring -- cooking food with no stove; my cousins say that. Children dart, hop, play among dark-skinned men wearing odd hats, bright scarves, and a few more women, younger, maybe mothers -- but so glowing, so dark-skinned. I’m six-and-a-half. It’s Grand Avenue, the near north side by the old water tower, Spring I believe, and the War’s ended. My cousins are grownups and Joy’s saying she loves Zane Gray: What a writer! Or was it Dee? Yes. I’ll be the flower girl in Dee’s wedding soon, so I’ve promised not to skin my knees anymore. Until after: Dee insists. But the sound of that strange name -- Zane, with its bee’s sting -- gives the second light in this slow unfolding, a word nearly as thrilling as the gypsies. Best is the third, gypsy moth of my future: to see, to hear for sure than an adult, too, can live for those shimmering worlds called into being by books. This last bit of memory’s bright triptych that’s outlived Dee still gives me chills.
Brenda Roper
Trish Barnes
Winter
Outside— just a window and some way-back branching of evolution between us— a mule deer roots at the butt of the apple tree. Strange year, 2009, when leaves did not fall but blackened and stuck there, all for the few this deer searches under for fruit. The master rancher told us ungulates know precisely when to eat all gestures of green. And science confirms nutrient saturation just as dark lips rip out each expression in its turn from the bracing growth of spring. Now it’s December. Black bags of apple wine stay pinned to branches in the air. The deer roots for nothing this year.